Cities have been rapidly reconfigured in the aftermath of the global financial crisis. Recent scholarship at the urban-financialization interface highlights how financial, real-estate and state actors are spearheading a range of urban experiments that embed new financial rationalities in urban policy agendas. Some researchers argue that we are witnessing an evolving financialised regime of urban governance (Lake, 2015; Peck and Whiteside, 2016) while others chart how the assetisation or financialisation of land is increasingly a key goal of urban policy (Kaika and Ruggiero 2014, Savini and Aalbers 2015). This paper focuses on post-crisis cities, where new roles have been cast for a host of new financial and real estate actors, particularly those with highly-financialised business models and shorter-term investment horizons. Adopting ideas of patient/impatient capital from the comparative political economy (CPE) literature and using Dublin as an emblematic post-crash city, this paper traces the acquisition, investment and exit strategies of key private-equity and international real-estate companies, highlighting their interactions with local (and extra-local) actors including REITs, institutional investors (patient capital), developers, and significantly, NAMA. The paper argues that the short-term, high-velocity financial logic of these funds in buying, restructuring and disposing of distressed assets, is becoming deeply embedded in Dublin’s urban policy regime, some implications of which are considered in the conclusion.
Geography: Sinead Kelly Seminar